Latest news with #SophieStava
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Nothing will stop this Psychological Thriller becoming a runaway bestseller: Count My Lies by Sophie Stava, It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara, The Palazzo by Kayte Nunn
Count My Lies by Sophie Stava (Century £16.99, 336pp) The author nails it with this book from the first sentence. A young woman in a trendy New York neighbourhood claims to be a nurse as she helps a very handsome father tend to his little girl who's been stung by a bee. But Sloane Caraway is actually a nail technician and compulsive liar who manages to inveigle her way into the lives of the glamorous father Jay Lockhart and his wife Violet. The ensuing original and twisty plot lines provide a very convincing psychological study of why people actually tell lies. It's not long before Sloane realises that the Lockharts are not what they seem either. Meanwhile, Sloane becomes obsessed with growing more and more like Violet. Events then lead to an explosive, if not entirely satisfactory, ending. With its punchy, chatty, writing style, nothing will stop this from becoming a runaway bestseller. It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara (Bantam £16.99, 400pp) This plot plays expertly into one of our worst nightmares. Susan, a sleep deprived teacher on maternity leave, feels affronted by a WhatsApp message from a neighbour named Celeste and decides to vent to her sister about Celeste's awful children and her philandering husband. Too late to delete, she realises she has sent the message to the whole neighbourhood. At first she thinks the fuss will pass but then people start to be murdered. One of the victims is a woman who has the same address as her, but in a different part of town. The tension is very well maintained throughout and the author resists the temptation to be overly dramatic. The convincing storyline maintains real dread in a world of everyday domestic detail. Very enjoyable. The Palazzo by Kayte Nunn (No Exit Press £9.99, 304pp) The perfect remote setting for this crafty thriller is a renovated former convent in the Italian Alps. The Palazzo Stellina has been hired by a beauty entrepreneur to celebrate her 40th birthday with her family and friends. A luxury swimming pool and handsome chef are all part of the package. When a murder occurs, the scene is expertly set for a locked-room mystery as all the guests have their own reasons to be suspects or maybe victims. The cleverly constructed plot keeps us guessing while we enjoy the well-drawn luxurious backdrop of the Palazzo.
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
After 15 years of rejection, Costa Mesa author earns nationwide acclaim with her thriller ‘Count My Lies'
Costa Mesa-based author Sophie Stava beamed under bright lights and the gaze of a national television audience as she fielded questions about her first published novel, 'Count My Lies,' on its release day, Tuesday March 4. The domestic thriller about a compulsive liar who becomes a nanny for a family with secrets of their own was featured as the book of the month by 'Good Morning America.' 'It was another fantasy come true, something you secretly wish for yourself but you don't say out loud because how crazy does that sound?' Stava told the Daily Pilot before knocking on a wooden table in the Newport Beach Public Library to ward off bad luck during an interview Tuesday. 'There've just been so many 'pinch me' moments.' Multiple publishers showed interest in 'Count My Lies' before she inked a deal with Simon & Schuster last year on Valentine's Day. She said seeing it promoted alongside Stephen King's latest title and compared to one of her own favorite novels — Gillian Flynn's 'Gone Girl' — has been nothing short of surreal. She'll dive into the path that led to her novel's critically lauded debut, her inspirations and more during a meet-and-greet Tuesday evening, April 8 in Newport Beach. That event will be held at the Central Library on Avocado Avenue, where earlier this week 29 people were on a waiting list to check out the dozen or so copies on loan there. Her recent success comes after well over a decade of rejection, soul searching and perseverance. 'Having 15 years of 'no' or 'not now' and 'not yet, but your close,' I had a lot of time to fantasize about an editor saying 'I want to work with you; I see something special here,'' Stava said. Stava studied literature at UC Santa Barbara before going into the field of marketing after college. That paid the bills, but never felt like the right fit for her. Things came to a head when a company that provides SAT training hired her to do direct marketing. But they wound up having her cold-calling potential customers instead. 'Needless to say I wasn't great at it,' Stava said. 'I was let go, and I said to my husband, who I was dating at the time, 'I'm never going back to the corporate world.'' She responded to a vague Craigslist post seeking a ghost writer around 2012, as hype was growing over the erotic romance title '50 Shades of Grey.' Her client gave her a rough outline of a love story and paid her $6,000 to flesh out its characters and narrative. Stava tried to follow that up by self-publishing a romance novel in her own name, but that effort failed to turn a profit. She managed to maintain confidence in her talent thanks to the support of close family and friends, and eventually decided she needed to focus solely on writing. 'So much about selling is about timing, about what the market is looking for, what they think editors are looking for,' Stava said. 'It's sort of like timing the stock market.' She hired an agent to make up for her shortcomings as a marketer. And instead of trying to cash in on a waning trend of erotic fiction, Stava turned inward to her personal favorite genre of literature: thrillers. Stava poured herself into creating her first mystery novel, refining it over numerous revisions. But after two years had passed, she was still unable to convince an editor to pick up the title. 'It was devastating,' Stava said. 'I thought with every revision I was gonna hear, 'It's ready. We're going to send it to editors.' The writer said she wasn't sure if it was conviction or 'delusion' that drove her to start over on her third book. But, unlike her previous efforts, the drafts that eventually became 'Count My Lies' immediately caught the attention of publishers and editors. Stava thinks the strength of her novel lies in it's page-turning plot. She also believes the issues of identity, public perception and authenticity its characters navigate are deeply relatable to audiences in the era of social media. 'At it's core, 'Count My Lies' is about the desperation for connection, to be seen, to be accepted,' Stava said. 'I think that really resonates with people, especially after the pandemic when a lot of us were really isolated and lonely, and we missed a lot of those connections.' Stava said she considers herself a reader first and a writer second, so she's honored by the knowledge other bookworms are getting lost in a fantasy born of her imagination. It would never have come to life without her parents, who inspired her love of reading and served as her earliest critics, and the constant encouragement of her husband. 'He said, 'It won't happen if you stop writing; it can only happen if you keep writing,'' Stava recalled. She's not resting on her breakthrough success and is already hard at work on the second draft of her next book. She described it as a domestic psychological thriller about a woman who moves to the East Coast with her family and 'falls into a group of women who seem to be up to no good.' 'My mind is spinning,' Stava said. 'Words are coming.'
